Thomas Heywood's early melodrama A Woman Killed by Kindness - I’ll say you wept, I’ll swear you made me sad

I have called Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle hacks, but Thomas Heywood was the greatest hack of the Age of Shakespeare, having “an entire hand or at least the main finger” in “two hundred and twenty” (!) plays (Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies, p. 38). He is more like a television writer. His most famous play, A Woman Killed by Kindness (1603), is like a television melodrama, a weepy. It even has a clear A plot and B plot, which only connect in the first and last scenes. A gentleman in trouble – in prison – for debt tries to prostitute his sister. Somehow this story works out for the best for everyone. I suppose this is the B plot. In the A plot, another gentleman catches his wife with another man but refrains from murdering them, instead killing her with kindness. FRANKFORD: My words are register’d in Heaven already; With patience hear me. I’ll not martyr thee, Nor mark thee for a strumpet, but with usage Of more humility torment thy soul, And kill thee, even with kindness.…